Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

“Go!” Frank barked, covering the security guard and the other two. “I’ve got this. Just get out of here!”

  “No!” the guard said. “Don’t … don’t move!”

  Nick grabbed Tess by the arm. “Go!”

  Then they were running, all four of them. The employees shouted as they bolted for the street door through which they’d entered. Audrey slammed it open and then they were in the street, racing for the cars. Frank did not allow the security guard to follow.

  Tess still dragged the white tablecloth beside her, right hand clutching it around her shard of the psychomanteum. Somehow she had been unable to leave it behind, which was for the best.

  She felt sure she would need it.

  EIGHTEEN

  Steven crouched in a corner of the cellar of the Otis Harrison House, cloaked in shadows deeper than the darkness around him. The stone floor vibrated with the power of the voice that came from that round pit in the middle of the room, insinuating words spoken in a language he had never learned but whose meaning he understood. He felt the words in his heart. Sensed the weight and shape of them.

  The words made him feel strong and full of purpose.

  Something shifted in the cellar and he twitched and whipped his head around to peer into the darkness. He bared his teeth, some small part of him reeling in horror at the savagery of the response, but the rest of him rejoicing in it. He sniffed the air, caught a strange scent—like the smoke from burning leaves—and then saw dust begin to swirl and eddy across the cellar. With a ripple of shadow, a scrap of dark fabric appeared amid that swirling dust devil. It billowed and grew, and Steven watched it sculpt itself into a man.

  Berrige, he thought, but he knew the thought was not his own. Even the voice inside his head was not his own voice. The name of this filthy, grizzled, blindfolded man had come from the pit.

  Steven felt the voice’s recognition. Berrige is the servant, he thought. The previous servant.

  “You have failed,” Steven felt himself saying, his throat barely able to contain the deep rumble of that voice.

  The blind man glided through the shadows toward him … toward the pit. His long black coat had been torn to ribbons and long strips of the fabric fluttered around him, reaching out and floating in the dark like the tendrils of some terrible sea creature.

  “It’s not too late,” Berrige said, pausing near the edge of the pit. He cocked his head back, sniffing the air, and then snapped his head around to stare blindly at the corner where Steven crouched. “There are others who will come. Tainted others. They will serve well enough.”

  Caressed by darkness, breathing it into himself, Steven felt what the voice felt. A bargain had been struck. There was to be a ritual. After ages trapped halfway through a doorway at the bottom of the pit, the voice might be freed at last if only Berrige would fulfill his promise. The yearning, the hunger, the hatred that seethed from the voice in the pit raged in Steven’s own veins. He shook with it, dug his fingernails into his palms until blood dripped to the stone floor.

  “It is not for you to decide what will serve,” the voice of the pit whispered through him.

  Berrige ignored him now, approaching the pit.

  “You will have what you desire,” Berrige said, hanging his head in obeisance. “We will both be free.”

  Steven’s soul had shimmered with malice only a moment before, intent upon punishment. Now he felt the thing in the pit hesitate, and in that moment of uncertainty he blinked and found himself alone in the darkness. Panic seized him. He felt the wall at his back, heard the scritch of small stones under the soles of his shoes, but he could see nothing and could hear only the soft breath of the other man in the room and the hollow emptiness of the pit. He gave a quiet gasp as his mind replayed the past few hours, free from the horrid intelligence that had subsumed him.

  Bile burned up the back of his throat and he clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from throwing up. To keep from screaming. With his other hand he sought his gun. He searched his memory in hopes that he could remember where he had dropped his flashlight.

  His fingers bumped the gun, searched its contours, and then his training kicked in and he brought the weapon up and aimed it into the darkness where he had been able to see Berrige only seconds before. He opened his eyes wide but there was no light at all, nothing to give away the location of the pit or the blindfolded man except his memory.

  He felt sick. Coated in a film of shit. Disgusted with himself in a way that made him want to scream and tear off his own skin to be clean, but even then he would have to thrust his fingers down his throat and vomit up the taint of the thing that had snuck inside him. The urge to spit hatred at Berrige, to speak his anguish, nearly overwhelmed him but he bit down on the words. These were not human things and he was only a man.

  Gun hand steady, he slid two steps sideways. If he could find the wall he could make his way to the stairs.

  Stop.

  The voice in the pit would not allow him to go.

  Feel it. Feel them, the voice said, and just like that it was inside him again. With a flicker his vision returned, a palette of grays. The words from the pit were no longer just guttural rumblings now. He understood, but in that instant when the demon wound its influence around him again, he knew that it was not that the voice had learned his language. It had infected him deeply enough that its words had become his words.

  They’re here, it said inside him, and in a rumble from the pit.

  Steven did not have to interpret the words. He felt them arriving outside the house, felt them climbing out of the two cars they had driven here. He felt them because the demon felt them. Across the cellar, Berrige turned toward the outside wall and cocked his head back, inhaling deeply. Below the stained and tattered blindfold, he smiled a rot-toothed grin and uttered a sigh of cruel satisfaction.

  “No,” Steven whispered, or thought he had. His lips had not moved. The demon felt his reluctance and then burned it from his heart.

  The gun grew lighter in his hand and he grinned a grin that mirrored Berrige’s.

  Lili, no, a tiny piece of him thought. Run.

  But he began to creep toward the stairs, grin widening, grip tightening on the gun. The voice in the pit required that the ritual be finished. It had been interrupted so long ago, but tonight it would at last be completed.

  That malice in him felt so good that he laughed.

  “No,” Berrige growled. “I will make the offerings. I will be free.”

  The dead magician swept across the cellar, savagely baring his teeth. Steven snapped around, took aim, and shot him twice in the chest. Berrige grunted, staggered backward a single step, and then the shadows of his coat stitched up the holes the bullets had left behind.

  Berrige lunged and grabbed hold of him. Steven struggled but the dead man had momentum. Strips of torn fabric from Berrige’s coat wrapped around Steven’s forearms as the magician drove him backward, then twisted and hurled him along the cellar floor. The gun fell from Steven’s hand as he struck the stones and rolled right over the edge of the pit. The gun clattered along the stones. It was the last thing Steven saw as his fingers grasped for purchase and found none.

  He fell into a cloud of the demon’s frigid breath.

  Cold as ice.

  As death.

  NINETEEN

  Tess stood in front of the Otis Harrison House for the first time since the day their team had completed work in the cellar—the day the psychomanteum had been dismantled and packed away. On that warm and rainy afternoon she had thought it just another job, fascinating but fleeting. One to remember, but nothing that would have any lasting impact on her life. Now she stared at the dead birds that littered the street and the sidewalk around the property.

  “Over here!” Nick called.

  She flinched, stared a moment longer at the face of the house, and then pulled her attention away. Nick and Audrey had gone to the corner of the house and tried the street door. Tess looked over to see it already yawning o
pen.

  “How did they manage that?” Lili asked.

  Tess glanced at her, saw the blood-soaked scarf wrapped around her hand, and shuddered. “Let’s go.”

  Lili nodded but made no move toward the open door. Tess saw the terror in her eyes and went to her, put her left hand on Lili’s arm, and waited until their eyes met.

  “I’m with you, no matter what happens in there. We walk in together, and we walk out together.”

  The smile Lili managed then was spectacularly unconvincing, but Tess gave her points for trying.

  A car went past on the street behind them, windows partway down despite the chilly fall evening. Music drifted into the night, receding as the car continued on its way as if nothing at all strange could possibly be unfolding there in that old house on Beacon Hill. Tess blinked and stared at Lili and then at Nick and Audrey, who waited a dozen feet ahead. She glanced at the steps that led up to the small front yard and the main door of the Harrison House, then turned and scanned the other buildings. Across the street, a slender man in an expensive suit hunched against the night wind and hurried by, briefcase in hand. Lawyer or politican, she guessed, and wondered if he was in a rush to get home or just to pass by this house as quickly as possible.

  The real world—the ordinary world—might not want to see or acknowledge the malignant presence within the house, but they felt it. Tess knew they did. The house radiated such malevolent hostility that Tess felt as if she were pushing through some putrid, bilious membrane just walking toward that door.

  The people who lived in the buildings around the Harrison House would go on pretending nothing was amiss because the evil inside its walls had not touched them. Had not caused the dead to try to steal their faces, to break into their homes and cradle their children. Tess knew the Society of the Lesser Key had acted out of fear and desperation, but she had no more sympathy for them than she did for Cornell Berrige. They had indulged in forbidden rituals and wielded black magic with the same breathless curiosity and trembling lust for power as small children starting fires just to watch things burn. The ghosts of the Lesser Key had been laid to rest or trapped forever in a prison of glass—she didn’t care which. But the night wasn’t over.

  “Audrey,” she said quietly as she and Lili reached the door. “What now?”

  Nick frowned, glancing quickly around to make sure no one was watching them breaking and entering. “What do you mean, what now? We find Berrige and finish this.”

  “And after Berrige?” Tess asked.

  Lili hung back, staring into the gray gloom beyond the street door. Somewhere not far off, a woman began to shout and then a man barked back as an argument ensued. Incongruous, but perhaps not entirely.

  “I have a theory,” Audrey said. “A hope, really. But let’s save it for later. We know why we’re here.”

  Tess exhaled loudly. They did indeed.

  Audrey led the way, slipping into the gloomy interior of the Harrison House. Nick stepped aside, still watching the street. The voices of the arguing couple continued to rise, a hurricane of domestic frustration, but when Tess walked through that door it felt as if she had left all of Beacon Hill behind. The door remained open but silence claimed her, a deathly quiet that reminded her of winter nights from her childhood, snowbound with the power off and everyone else asleep.

  Lili followed her in, and then Nick closed the door behind them.

  The silence felt complete then.

  “God, it’s so cold,” Nick said, and Tess could see his breath.

  Her own breath, too. She shivered, wondering how she hadn’t noticed. Chilly as the night had turned outside, in here every breath fogged the air. Crystals had formed on the walls and there were patches of ice on the windows.

  “How…?” Tess began.

  Audrey glanced at her and she realized that it didn’t matter how. Occult rituals had been performed in this place, more than once. Cornell Berrige had tried to draw a demon into the world, to part the curtains separating the ordinary world from whatever actual hell might exist beyond it. A crack had formed, as though Berrige had begun to open a window and it had gotten jammed. Invited or not, the malicious presence Berrige had summoned became stuck and after all of these years, it wanted out.

  In the car, Tess had torn the tablecloth from the Nepenthe Hotel into strips. She carried the shard of mirror from the psychomanteum in her right hand, wrapped several times around the broken glass. It felt like a paltry weapon—she’d rather have had a shotgun or a crate full of grenades—but she didn’t need Audrey’s experience to know that they could not destroy evil with a bullet.

  “Hey,” Nick said, looming in front of her as if he’d appeared from nowhere.

  “Yeah?”

  He touched her face. Tenderly, the way he had in better days. “You’re drifting.”

  Tess flinched away from him. “Don’t touch me.”

  Nick stiffened, brow knitting. He held a shard of broken mirror as well, so he reached up with his left hand. “We’re going downstairs, Tess. If you want to stay up here—”

  A rush of alarm went through her and she glanced around to find that Lili and Audrey were gone. Farther ahead, she saw the door open—the door that had been uncovered in the renovation of the house, the discovery of which had led to them all coming here in the first place.

  She’d lost time. “I…” she began.

  The cold came rushing in. She shuddered and hunched forward a little, breath pluming in front of her. A little moan escaped her throat as she felt the pain in her shoulder and hip—the old pain, made worse by the icy chill in the house and by the exertions of the day. Adrenaline had pushed it away, overridden it with fear, and she’d been moving around quite a bit. Now the frigid air made the muscles contract and she felt grinding aches and the pull of scarred flesh.

  The pain woke her. Reminded her of who she was. Not the perfect version of Tess, but the human one. A broken girl. The woman who endured.

  “Something—” she began.

  Audrey called quietly to them from the cellar door. She held a heavy-duty flashlight in her hand—the one that had been in the trunk of Lili’s car.

  “Stay here,” Nick said, practically blocking her way. “Better yet, go. I don’t know what we were thinking. Maddie needs you.”

  Tess breathed in air so cold it hurt her lungs. “We hurt Berrige. You really think he’s going to be forgiving? If we don’t finish him, he’ll come for us. What Maddie needs is for this to be over.”

  “Hey,” Lili whispered. “Quiet.”

  “Can’t you feel that?” Audrey said, hugging herself against the cold, face etched with fear. She clicked on the flashlight. “It already knows we’re here.”

  Tess stopped breathing for a moment. The house seemed to do the same. She looked at the frost on the walls and floor, at the ice on the knob of the cellar door, and then she tightened her grip on the mirror shard and felt its edge dig into her palm, even through the strip of tablecloth she’d wrapped around it.

  “Screw it, then,” she said. “What are we whispering for?”

  She pushed past Nick and joined Audrey and Lili by the door. Audrey started down and Tess went after her, not bothering to soften her footfalls. Nick and Lili followed, all of them careful on the icy steps. Tess let her left hand trail along the wall, the cold sinking invisible blades into her back and shoulder. There were stretches she could do … exercises … but not here, and not now. The pain didn’t matter, really. If anything, it only cleared her mind.

  Tess felt a comforting weight in the pocket of her jacket, but knew the time hadn’t come just yet.

  Her heart thrummed in her chest as they moved down the stairs. The cold and the dark enveloped them and she thought if it wasn’t for the light of Audrey’s flashlight, the ice might have swept in with the darkness and frozen them all there forever. She heard Nick breathing at her back, heard the creak of Lili’s footfalls on the steps, kept her eyes locked on the beam of yellow light that cut the darkness
below, and then they were at the bottom of the steps.

  Something scritched against the stone floor.

  Audrey swung the flashlight and the beam swept left to right. Tess frowned when she saw the pit—

  “No,” Nick whispered behind her. “They filled it. The contractors…”

  —and the gun, just a foot from the lip of the pit. Where had it—

  —and the black silhouette of the raggedy man.

  Berrige stood off to their right, ten feet from the pit. Frost coated his jacket and his filthy blindfold. His head lay back and he inhaled their presence, then grunted out that air with a low snarl. Audrey’s light locked on him, chasing away the darkness around him, but a simple flashlight could not push back the shadows inside the raggedy man.

  “Kill him,” Lili said. “Audrey, move. We’ve got to—”

  Berrige rushed the stairs as if blown on an icy gale, coat flapping around him. Tess shouted Audrey’s name, clutched the mirror shard in her hand and tried to move, but the dead man was too fast. By scent, Berrige found Audrey. With the flashlight beam whipping around, strafing the ceiling, he lifted her by the throat and hurled her across the cellar. As she tumbled on the stone floor and cried out, the flashlight bounced once, struck the stones a second time, and then winked out.

  Between the first and second bounce, Tess lashed out with the mirror shard and snagged Berrige’s coat. In the first moment of darkness, her urge was to rip, but destroying the coat was no longer the goal. The souls he’d trapped inside that jacket, in the shadowy interior of the fabric, had already been drawn out—stolen from the raggedy man and his master. So she fought her instinct and instead of tearing, she stabbed. The shard sank easily into the dead man’s flesh, as if he was made of little more than skin and shadows, and Berrige hissed in pain and reeled away.

  “Look out, Tess!” Nick snapped.

  She darted left and heard a loud scrape, and then their end of the cellar blossomed into a waterfall of bright crimson light. Nick tossed the road flare to the floor where Berrige had been a second ago. Tess dropped to one knee, put down her mirror shard as she pulled two flares from her jacket pocket, ripped the caps off, and dragged them against the stone floor. They ignited in a rush of heat and light and she hurled them one at a time into the far corners of the cellar. The whole room was rimed with frost and the cold seared their flesh, but in the flickering crimson brilliance, the cellar looked like a proper hell indeed.